{"id":23719,"date":"2011-11-28T08:00:37","date_gmt":"2011-11-28T13:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=23719"},"modified":"2011-12-08T14:25:21","modified_gmt":"2011-12-08T19:25:21","slug":"the-art-of-not-drowning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/11\/28\/the-art-of-not-drowning\/","title":{"rendered":"The Unlikely Event"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Because I do not want to die in the brawny arms of an industrial-kitchen-fixtures salesman from Tulsa\u2014at least, not one I\u2019ve only just met\u2014I don\u2019t much care for airline travel. During a recent trip from Salt Lake City, my Boeing 757 began to lurch and heave and make dreadful noises. At times we seemed to be in free fall. I caught the look on our veteran flight attendant\u2019s face as she rushed by: it was genuine fear. During one particularly terrifying plunge, I felt the brawny fingers of that kitchen-fixtures salesman inching toward me, tugging at my sleeve. I needed an escape. I reached into the seat pocket in front of me.<\/p>\n

At 33,000 feet, and falling, we are presented with roughly the same options as on earth. First, we get the in-flight magazine\u2019s glossy parade of petit bourgeois distraction. But, face it, when your plane is going down, what good is a recipe for a quick and easy hake with hazelnuts and capers? For those seeking something more directly relevant, there\u2019s the Sartre-esque barf bag. But for those of us who occupy that metaphysical middle ground between the in-flight magazine and the barf bag, there\u2019s the airline safety card.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>As everyone knows, the story contained in this pamphlet has little to do with anything resembling the truth. If shit goes down, if that horrifying alarm is sounded, will your fellow passengers really calmly place oxygen masks over their faces? Will that crazy lady sitting next to you inflate her life jacket in a quiet and orderly fashion? (\u201cPut it on as you would a waistcoat,\u201d a 1930s British Imperial Airways card advises its clientele.) In the history of aviation, has any plane ditched over the north Atlantic, leaving its passengers floating in the mountainous, frigid waves of the open ocean with serene expressions on their faces? Airline safety cards aren\u2019t instructional guides, they are works of fantastic imagination.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t meant to denigrate the safety card. On the contrary, if ever there were an occasion for bold revisions of reality, surely the art of airline crisis is it. The form itself abhors strict realism. A 1992 cross-cultural study conducted at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University determined that people prefer graphic illustrations instead of photography on airline safety cards. Photos, the study claimed, are inevitably full of distracting detail, or \u201cvisual noise.\u201d Hence the safety-card aesthetic: spare, noiseless projections that maintain a zenlike neutrality to the chaos and horror of the actual event. It comes as no surprise that these drawings are always a centimeter away from completely missing the point. According to the 1992 study, European passengers are more apt to correctly identify an image of a high-heeled shoe, whereas Americans, a more homely bunch, are more apt likely to classify the high-heel simply as \u201ca shoe\u201d\u2014the consequences of this misidentification can be tragic. In plane crashes and minimalist art, every detail matters.<\/p>\n

The best airline-safety-card artists know how to amplify these details without creating too much noise. They are, after all, artists. They work within and bend the conventions of their form by playing with allusions to earlier work. Take, for example, a current US Airways safety card that portrays the conventional water flotation scene. We see a beautiful woman, with lush red hair, floating effortlessly, gazing ahead in an attitude of easeful melancholy. The airline artist has recruited Dante Rossetti\u2019s 1877 Mary Magdalene<\/em>, with perhaps an ironic nod to Botticelli\u2019s Venus, as the heroine of our worst-case scenario. Thus the \u201cfallen woman\u201d motif is reimagined in the most urgent terms: this airline Magdalene is a woman who has quite literally fallen. And this is where we find her, floating in limbo, clutching a lily-white life preserver to her breast (instead of a vase, as in the 1877 portrait). Like Rossetti\u2019s romantic Pre-Raphaelite Magdalene, this woman\u2019s lowly state serves only to magnify her elemental beauty. Here she is, Our Lady of the Plane Crash. \u201cI will make you fishers of men,\u201d says the Christ. \u201cWe will rescue you in any corner of the globe,\u201d says a Pan Am safety card. The fallen woman will not remain cast away forever\u2014and, if we follow her lead, the artist assures us, neither will we. It is a pretty vision of earthly salvation.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The artist behind a current AeroMexico safety card is not convinced. In an echo of The Son of Man<\/em>, the 1964 painting by Belgian Surrealist Ren\u00e9 Magritte, the AeroMexico man is rendered in realistic detail\u2014from rolled up sleeves to tousled hair\u2014all of which is, however, a set up for the darkly comic punch line: the man has no face. This bit of surrealistic surgery, more than the yellow life preserver, is what we remember. It is plain to us that this creepily inanimate son of man is, in struggling to preserve his life, in some sense already dead.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Another current airline-safety card riffs on Hopper\u2019s 1942 painting, Nighthawks<\/em>, and imagines the conventional post-crash scene as a variation on the loneliness-within-a-group motif:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Back in the fifties, safety-card artists worked with a lighter touch. A Qantas Empire Airways safety card, drawn in the wink-and-grin style of a men\u2019s magazine cartoon, depicts a sporting fellow leaning over the side of a lifeboat, flirting with a long, lean, blonde mermaid, much to the annoyance of his wife. Other life-raft images from the period feature a cast of dapper country clubbers reclining, puffing on pipes, scanning menus as smirking fish and seagulls breeze by. A Lufthansa card shows a lifeboat packed full of delicious foods, wine, and a fishing rod.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Is it possible that in the golden age of aviation even the crashes were glamorous? What are we to make of the safety card that says, \u201cLife vests are fashionable and quite handsomely tailored.\u201d Certainly something has been lost. A Pan Am Boeing B-377 card gives escape directions with reference to \u201cthe ladies\u2019 powder room,\u201d \u201cthe coat rack,\u201d \u201cspiral staircase,\u201d and \u201ccocktail lounge.\u201d And if we were wondering about the pilot, well, rest assured, he\u2019s a stud. \u201cRemember,\u201d the card tells passengers, \u201cthat while the captain may have played the genial host under normal conditions, his authority is absolute.\u201d In this sexy environment, it somehow isn\u2019t surprising that the safety card tells passengers, who find their plane going down, to \u201cloosen your tie … but keep all your clothes on.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to get nostalgic for an era of flight before we were forced to stand barefoot and humbled before the gropings of uniformed agents, long before the time when our fellow passengers occasionally tried to kill us. But it turns out that the fifties and sixties, safety-card whimsy was designed to lighten the widespread fears of that era, of a population still new to flight.<\/p>\n

For all the old cards may have had in terms of sex appeal, they often lacked in tact. They were textually expansive; often, they said too much. In order to justify the need for oxygen masks, one safety card helpfully noted that modern aircraft fly at \u201cvery high altitudes.\u201d A Canadair card from the early seventies boasted that its lifeboats were \u201cseaworthy, with great buoyancy.\u201d This was in contrast to the plane itself which would, the card promised, sink before your eyes. An old United card offers this uniquely discomfiting warning: \u201cmove out of this plane fast<\/span>. There is a fire-danger any time a landing is other than normal\u2014particularly when the airplane structure is damaged.\u201d No mention is made about staying calm. An Australian card confesses that the only means of escape involves kicking the window exit open with all of your might. VIASA, Venezuela\u2019s former national airline, urges people not to be anxious when the alarm is sounded. It asks passengers to \u201ckeep your muscles taut to absorb the sudden impact.\u201d Another card urges people to grab their warmest clothes before they jump into the sea. An Air France card directs passengers to the closest axe\u2014no further directions are given.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>But even in these cards there are some moments of genuine pathos. Like the best of the contemporary cards, which have almost entirely done away with text, the effect was achieved through a drawing. A late sixties Gulf Air card portrays a well-tailored Marvel Comics\u2013style man, stalwart and square jawed, prepared to meet his fate with a ducklike dignity.<\/p>\n

But there is something to this art form beyond the drawings or texts. The last page of many safety cards is blank, which would be unremarkable had they not also included this caption: This Panel Intentionally Left Blank. Thus ends the artifice. Here, on this page, there are no melancholic passengers or dreamboat captains, no stern warnings, only a blank screen upon which you and I may project \u2026 what, exactly? What are we to make of this combination of blankness and intent? Seasick and weary, Melville\u2019s Ishmael knew all about it. Whiteness, he said, \u201cstrikes more of panic to the soul than the redness which affrights in blood.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

Is it by its indefiniteness that it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the Milky Way? Or is it that whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows\u2014a colorless all-color of atheism from which we shrink?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This horrible dumb blankness, full of meaning, this colorless all-color of atheism, this drab charnel house within our hearts, yea, this universal white shroud, is the airline safety card\u2019s intentionally blank page. It pictures not an unlikely event but the only one about which there is absolute certainty.<\/p>\n

Avi Steinberg is the author of <\/em>Running the Books<\/a>, a memoir of his adventures as a prison librarian, recently out in paperback.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Because I do not want to die in the brawny arms of an industrial-kitchen-fixtures salesman from Tulsa\u2014at least, not one I\u2019ve only just met\u2014I don\u2019t much care for airline travel. During a recent trip from Salt Lake City, my Boeing 757 began to lurch and heave and make dreadful noises. At times we seemed to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":35,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[5062,5054,5053,5059,5056,5069,5060,4991,5071,4083,5067,5057,952,5065,5068,5061,5066,5064,5055,5063,5070,5058],"class_list":["post-23719","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-aeromexico","tag-airline","tag-airplane","tag-botticelli","tag-british-imperial-airways","tag-canadair","tag-dante-rossetti","tag-edward-hopper","tag-gulf-air","tag-herman-melville","tag-lufthansa","tag-mary-magdalene","tag-moby-dick","tag-nighthawks","tag-pan-am","tag-pre-raphaelite","tag-qantas","tag-rene-magritte","tag-sartre","tag-the-son-of-man","tag-united","tag-us-airways"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Unlikely Event by Avi Steinberg<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"November 28, 2011 \u2013 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